Pitcher Plant

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcher_plant

. . . Jonathan Smith has pointed out, in Darwin’s books about botany, there is something about Darwin’s preoccupation with the ordinary that extends beyond realism. Darwin’s preoccupation with the aberrant and the unique and the grotesque (as traces of indicators of large movements and significances) extends in the botany books to the study of plants that are truly, as Smith put it, “macabre,”

plants that trapped, killed and ate insects;. . . bizarrely ornamented, gaudy colored, fantastically structured flowers that lured insects into unwittingly effecting cross-fertilization: and. . . species with various sexual forms and multiple reproductive possibilities. While these works also embodied a realistic spirit, the literature of the day that most looked like Darwin’s botany was not the realistic novel of Trollope and Eliot, but the “sensation fiction” that flourished in those same decades, the thrilling novels full of shocking crimes and illicit sexuality by Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, and others. ~ Page 127

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Dinesh ^club

Malacca and Mount Ophir

July to September, 1954

. . . We had been told we should find water in Padang Batu
(Ilir Talo, Seluma Regency, Bengkulu, Indonesia) buyt we looked about for it in vain, as we were exceedingly thirst. At last we turned to the pitcher-plants, but the water contained in the pitchers (about half a pint in each_ was full of insects and otherwise uninviting. On tasting, it however, we found it very palatable, though rather warm, and we all quenched our thirst from these natural jugs. . . . Page 25

20 months ago. Edited 20 months ago.

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